An Armchair Revolution, and Barbie, Too

VHS Film Retrospective at Museum of Arts and Design

One of the characters portrayed by a doll in the biopic “Superstar,” 1987.Credit
Ice Tea Productions

IT was the video that went viral before there was such a thing as viral video. Todd Haynes’s “Superstar,” released in 1987, was a darkly campy and experimental biopic about Karen Carpenter, who rose to fame with her brother, Richard, in the ’70s pop group the Carpenters, and who fought a protracted battle with anorexia nervosa before her death at 32 in 1983. In the film characters were portrayed by plastic dolls, including Barbies, that looked as if they’d been plucked from a garage-sale free bin. Running 43 minutes, “Superstar” was a phenomenon, but not at the multiplex. It was shown primarily in galleries, museums and clubs, though it had a theatrical life at some repertory houses. Eventually it was copied and widely traded on bootleg VHS tapes, available for rent at alternative video stores across the country.

As filmmakers, distributors and exhibitors wrestle with the rise of digital platforms that let us watch movies on laptops and cellphones, it’s worth remembering another time when advances in technology gave viewers the power to decide where and when they got their entertainment. VHS — short for Video Home System — set off a revolution in consumer entertainment when it was first introduced by JVC in 1976. It came down to convenience: Who needs a theater when a VCR turned every home into a cineplex? The era is explored in a retrospective, simply called “VHS,” running through Aug. 19 at the Museum of Arts and Design at Columbus Circle. Far from an exhaustive survey, the series mostly consists of screenings of low-budget works like “Superstar” that demonstrate how VHS upended the system of making, sharing and consuming moving pictures.

That a museum is devoting attention to VHS is a nostalgic delight for fans like Nick Prueher, the author, with Joe Pickett, of the book “VHS: Absurd, Odd, and Ridiculous Relics From the Videotape Era” (2011).

Photo

A frame grab of a scene from “Tales from the Quadead Zone,” 1987.Credit
Erry Vision Film Company

“There are organizations dedicated to preserving the great films,” Mr. Prueher said. “But there’s no temperature-controlled vault with the Angela Lansbury exercise video. Those kinds of things will be lost forever if there aren’t people hanging onto them.” (As part of the retrospective, this month, the performance artist Jeffrey Marsh will host “Sweating to the Oldies,” honest-to-god workout classes using original exercise tapes from home-fitness stars like Richard Simmons and Jane Fonda, and lesser-known Lycra fans like Elvira and Traci Lords.)

Buzz is high among VHS enthusiasts for the museum’s July 6 screening of “Tales From the Quadead Zone,” a 1987 horror anthology featuring a woman reading macabre stories to her phantom son. Poorly shot, badly acted and directed by Chester Novell Turner, a little-known filmmaker whose work also includes “Black Devil Doll From Hell,” “Tales From the Quadead Zone” is a holy grail for VHS collectors.

“Copies of it surfaced all over, from California to New York, even though it doesn’t look like it was made on this planet,” said Matthew Desiderio, producer of the coming documentary “Adjust Your Tracking: The Untold Story of the VHS Collector.” Mr. Desiderio is also an organizer of “VHS” with Jake Yuzna, the museum’s manager of public programs, and Rebecca Cleman.

Just as the DVR replaced the VCR, digital advances have also meant that films like “Quadead Zone” and “Superstar” are no longer clandestine favorites but are freely available on YouTube, probably uploaded from pirated VHS tapes. But bootleg copies still circulate. “I don’t know anyone who has seen ‘Superstar’ on anything but VHS or online,” Mr. Yuzna said. It wasn’t just major studios who, after a cautious start, embraced the format at the time. Regular people began experimenting, said Mr. Prueher, who with Mr. Pickett runs the Found Footage Festival, a traveling show of oddball VHS clips. “It was like a gold rush,” he added. “People for the first time could try out new things and be able to control movies in their home. Because the format was so cheap and readily available by the late ’80s, you had people who would have had no business in front of or behind the camera making videos.”

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Jane Fonda in a shot from one of her exercise videos.Credit
Inter Global Video

That wouldn’t include Mr. Haynes, of course, who is now better known for helping establish the New Queer Cinema of the early ’90s with “Poison” and for work like “Far From Heaven,” which earned him an Oscar nomination. But it was “Superstar” that put him on Hollywood’s radar.

Standing at the intersection of free speech, artistic appropriation and copyright law, “Superstar” exemplified how the VHS tape created what the film scholar Lucas Hilderbrand calls “new modes and expectations of access.” As word about the Barbie-Karen Carpenter movie spread beyond the artistic underground and into the mainstream — slowly, this being the pre-digital age — its demise was sealed. Mr. Haynes got in legal hot water with the Carpenter family and A&M Records, the duo’s label, for, among other things, using Carpenters music without permission. Mattel, the maker of Barbie, wasn’t happy either.

“It sounded much more meanspirited and cynical, to tell the story of Karen Carpenter with Barbie dolls, than the actual experience of watching the film,” Mr. Haynes recalled. “I could see that would never be something they were comfortable with.”

A settlement reached in 1990 prohibits “Superstar” from being sold, distributed or receiving any authorized exhibition, although Mr. Haynes said he retained some rights to show the film in the context of his other work. He said he was not aware of the Museum of Arts and Design screening. “The less I know probably the better,” he added. Mr. Yuzna said he had “reached out” to the Carpenters’ estate and was “not told that there would be issues” with showing it.

Despite efforts to stifle “Superstar,” it never really died. “In a way it’s out of my hands,” Mr. Haynes said. “The film has had its own life. It’s something that no one can totally control and suppress.”

"Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story" will be shown at 7pm on June 28 at the Museum of Arts and Design, 2 Columbus Circle; (212) 299-7777, madmuseum.org.

A version of this article appears in print on July 1, 2012, on page AR15 of the New York edition with the headline: An Armchair Revolution, And Barbie, Too. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe